


Extreme Prejudice

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Apocalypse Now (1979), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Apocalypse Now AU, Drug Use, Hux Vs. Chaos, M/M, Vietnam War, chaos wins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 03:37:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9801050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Vietnam, 1968. Eventually you died or you became a god or one or the other inside your own mind. Then they tried to send you home.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hollycomb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollycomb/gifts).



When he came to the photojournalist was standing over him having stolen one of his cigarettes. “Hello,” said the photojournalist. Shuddery eye-blinking lens of the Minolta shutter snapping _clickclickclickclickclick_ like the faraway crackle of flares or gunfire. There was a spreading shadow in his eye Hux realized was blood when he sat up. And his wrists had been tied across his belly rather haphazardly with rough rope. 

“Are you trying — ” Hux coughed. His throat was rough with flash-bang smoke and screaming. “Do you stage all your pictures?” 

The photojournalist crouched to meet Hux’s eye level. He was tall and severe with a hippie haircut he’d tied back with a bright cloth and he wore a Montagnard jacket and fatigues both of which were too short. Under the cloth he showed an inch of dirty pale belly and ankle at the ridge of his belt and soft-footed leather shoes. “I don’t _stage_ my pictures.” 

“You knocked me over the head and tied me up.” 

“Not to _stage_ a _picture_ ,” said the photojournalist. “I’m a photo _journalist_. I’ve covered the war since ’64. I took an oath — ” 

Hux had taken an oath too and he had been in the war since ’65. And he had seen photojournalists stage pictures. 

“It’s protocol,” said the photojournalist. 

“Whose protocol?” said Hux, though he already knew. “Where’s the rest of my crew from the PBR?” 

The photojournalist’s eyes had darkened or the black of them had expanded. Softly through the tree canopy it had begun as ever to rain, a thin needling and fragrant rain smattering with a bright sound upon the leaf litter. Whispers. 

“Colonel Snoke’s,” said the photojournalist; “who else?” 

\--

Hux had done a tour with the 173rd Airborne and after Dak To had come home to the bayou and laid in bed staring at the ceiling fan. Even after Hux’s mother’s death his father still lived in the old whitewashed plantation house which had been in the family since before the War of Northern Aggression. It was January but the humidity so heavy such that he would wake up sometimes not knowing exactly where he was. Hux’s brother was at Yale accruing draft deferments and he had functionally disowned the family and had written neither Hux nor his father since ’64. “Your mother, god bless her soul, must’ve died of a broken heart,” Hux’s father said, drunk in the study. Hux ignored him, which he had gotten very good at since high school, and went out for a walk on the grounds in fatigues and wading boots to test his nerves and shoot pheasants with a double-barreled shotgun. 

When he had left in ’65 he had been seeing somebody who quickly wanted no part of anything at all and after a tepid reorientation at a squalid local bar and the following dismal sex neither of them saw a point in contacting one another again. Besides this lover was a pacifist and a hippie and said he practiced “free love” and shortly thereafter left Assumption Parish for DC, where he was probably putting flowers in the barrels of guns. Hux hated him but at one time he had been a good fuck and he could still get grass with reliability. But there were other people for both those things. 

He tried to go back to what he had been doing before which was law school. He drove to Lafayette and sat in the lecture hall and stared at the blackboard hearing all the jungle screaming whizzing roaring shouts from the bush and sulphur smoke and pho spices and rot, rot, rot, living rot, and the fallen trees rotting, and the distant calls of animals, and bones and bodies in the forest rotting, and when the professor called on him he could not answer, and it was dark outside. 

He was only twenty-eight, and in April of that year — when he woke at 4:30am painfully aroused by nightmare and went to the bathroom to splash his face with water and jerk off in the toilet — he found a grey hair. So he went back. 

\--

According to a dossier Hux had been shown in Saigon, Colonel Snoke was a West Point graduate who had seen action in Korea. He had been in ‘Nam, first assigned to SOG and then as a Green Beret, since 1964. While Hux had been fighting at Dak To on Hill 875 Snoke had been sent covertly to Cambodia to raise Montagnard troops to fight the VC and NVA on the border. MACV had lost contact with Snoke sometime in 1967 and heard of his medieval methodology through the rumor mill only; they had bigger fish to fry and couldn’t begrudge Snoke a few severed heads and a bit of old-fashioned barbarism at the cost of success, until photographs had leaked to Life Magazine causing general public uproar and, rumor had it, a phone call to General Abrams from President Johnson himself. And so Hux had been tasked to terminate him with so-called Extreme Prejudice. “Chaos, you understand,” the General had told Hux, “must be rooted out whenever we are given the opportunity. And he is operating as an agent of chaos.” 

He had been sent upriver in a Navy PBR. The patrolmen who accompanied him likely by now were dead, which perhaps had been the point. They were a sort of blunt instrument. In all the two-week journey Hux hadn’t quite managed to remember their names. They liked rock music and hash and acid and most of them had been drafted directly off of small Midwestern farms and were on the brutal knife edge (exacerbated, of course, by the drugs, by the fear) of going utterly batshit. Which Hux supposed could be said for most of the Americans in Vietnam by ’68. What happened — and Hux knew this, because he had seen it happen a lot since ’65, and anyway his father had warned him about it, wasted in the study, before he had shipped out. What happened was the jungle started growing inside your blood. One could do any number of things to hold it off from happening and there were all sorts of inoculations one could attempt but it was all more a stay on inevitability than it was an effective prophylactic. Nothing could keep it from growing. Eventually you stopped bleeding red, then you stopped bleeding at all. Eventually you died or you became a god or one or the other inside your own mind. Then they tried to send you home. 

Hux himself was not altogether immune to it but he was from Louisiana, which helped. He knew the feeling that was the forest looking at you and could differentiate between that feeling and the feeling of VC looking at you, or at least he could do this most of the time, and anyway usually both the forest and the VC were looking at you. And the rain and the heat and the irrepressible humidity did not so much trouble him as it did boys from New York and Ohio and Kansas. He didn’t mind sweating and he had cut paths on the family property before with a machete and he had wandered in the woods with the shotgun action broken over his arm always breathing the sulfur and the rot and the silence. And it also helped that he thought he knew something, just through whatever cyclicality of intergenerational trauma, about losing a war. 

\--

He woke up again in a dark room with the photojournalist, who was expostulating on the course of empire. Somewhere on a tinny tape player that infernal Credence Clearwater Revival song played. The photojournalist was winding the film out of his Minolta slowly in tune with the music but he was looking across the room and judging from his eyes he was hardcore tripping as Hux’s battalion-mates had been known to do on the Dak To hills in the nights when all seemed lost and the flares screamed and burst above them like fireworks back home on the Fourth of July. The photojournalist had taken another of Hux’s cigarettes but the ash of it had burned almost to the filter and in the very stillness had not fallen and it was a long grey-black drooping heavy curl… and as such Hux realized it wasn’t in fact the photojournalist who was expostulating on the course of empire but it was someone else entirely. 

He sat up. His wrists had been unbound. The photojournalist stopped reeling his film and the cassette had stopped playing. The curl of ash fell from the end of the cigarette and broke like glass upon the floor. 

At the end of the room was a big bald man, features mostly indiscernible in shadow, reading from a book of poetry. The soft vellum pages had curled and warped with the heat. He wore the soft black VC pajamas (albeit several sizes larger than Hux had ever before seen) and his feet were bare. He looked hardly anything like the photograph of the young and handsome officer in Hux’s dossier mostly because of the deep abraded wound across his naked skull. Like he had been struck there with an axe or a machete. 

“You better listen, man,” said the photojournalist. His voice seemed shaking out of space. He pressed the ember of the cigarette out under his own bare foot. 

The poem Hux recognized from Catholic school as Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.” It seemed heavy-handed and besides he knew it already. The Colonel’s voice was almost eerily soft and deep and Hux wondered briefly if sometime along the line he’d gotten dosed. He wouldn’t’ve put it past the photojournalist who seemed like he had (once if not still) been the kind to’ve put LSD in the punch at fraternity parties out of a sort of misbegotten vengeance. 

“You better listen, man,” said the photojournalist again, “he’s talking to you.” 

“This poem is a kind of synecdochal allegory,” Hux told him. 

“It’s the swan song of paternalistic imperialism, man,” said the photojournalist. “It’s the end of an era, and he knows. The Colonel knows and that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” 

“I’m just here to talk to him.” 

“That’s — that’s your first mistake, man, that’ll get you killed, man, if you aren’t careful; you don’t talk to the Colonel, you just listen. Did you know I was a communist before I came here?” 

“I’m not surprised.” 

“He’ll turn your whole head up and down and you’ll thank him for it, man.” 

Hux was trying to think of a witty rejoinder to that but couldn’t. And anyway across the room the book closed with a dusty finite sound and the Colonel said, “You are Captain Armitage Hux, are you not?” 

So he had gotten ahold of the dossier in the PBR. Hux probably should have burned it. “Yes, sir,” he said. 

“505th Battalion, 173rd Airborne — assigned to SOG. You fought at Dak To — ”

“Yes, sir.” 

“And as for the assassinations — ”

He stopped there and looked up. His eyes were dark and intelligent and bored through Hux’s skull like termites. 

“I know of no such, no such assignments sir, and hypothetically if they had existed, I wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss them. Sir.” 

“Why have you come all the way to Cambodia, Captain Hux,” said the Colonel. Of course if he had read enough of the dossier to know about Hux’s assassinations it was likely he already knew. 

“My mission’s classified, sir.” 

The photojournalist laughed. He had a strange dark witch’s cackle of a laugh. 

“It’s time I think you shed a bit of that good breeding of yours,” said the Colonel. “We aren’t in Vietnam anymore.” 

“We’re about ten miles from Vietnam sir.” 

“An infinite capacity in space, man,” said the photojournalist. He had produced another of Hux’s cigarettes from somewhere and smoke coiled out his nose with an exorcistic opacity. Like a possessed artist in a horror movie. “This is a whole other fucking state of consciousness, man.” 

“You must lift your mind from the bureaucratic mire of it,” said the Colonel. “If you want to live.” 

“If I want — ” 

“If you want to be a soldier.”

“With all due respect I am a soldier, sir.” 

The Colonel spat something thick on the brushed-dust floor. “I don’t know what you are.” 

“A square, man,” said the photojournalist. “Another army square, man, sir yes sir, how high sir — ” 

The Colonel threw the Kipling book at him and he hunched protectively around his cameras. The sharp spine of it the book struck him in the back and he hardly flinched. When the book fell to the floor it opened where the spine had broken on the first page of “If.” 

“Where are you from?” the Colonel asked. 

“Louisiana, sir.” The Colonel waited, so Hux went on. “Assumption Parish, sir.” 

Something moved in the corner of the Colonel’s mouth like and unlike a smile. “Ah,” he said. 

“Sir?” 

“You have no accent.” The snake in his mouth again moved. “It has other ways that it gets to you, does it not.” 

“I don’t understand, sir.” 

The Colonel got up, stretching; he was big across the chest and almost impossibly tall; he would be the biggest man, Hux realized, he had ever watched himself kill. That was, if he managed to do it. 

“Perhaps not yet. But you will.” The Colonel indicated the photojournalist with a damning sort of glare; he didn’t notice, as he had begun to wind the film again. “This one understands. Sometimes I think it’s all this one understands.” 

\--

He was escorted out onto the premises by the photojournalist and a cadre of soldiers he first took to be all Montagnards until they came out into the sunshine and he saw a few of them were white under their filthy beards and ochre greasepaint, and they wore green berets. The PBR was empty in the brownish water below and the soldiers had covered it with large palm fronds against its being glimpsed from the sky. As though anything or anyone would dare to fly over and look down this deep into the jungle aside from God. Around the boat corpses of traitors hung from trees like grotesque ornaments and the grounds were decorated with severed heads mounted artfully upon sharpened stakes; for every few VC among them there was an American or two. And watching all around broadcasting a hushing thrum of whispers in Vietnamese and Khmer were maybe eight score men and women and children filthy and suspicious in rags. Most of them — even the children — held some sort of weapon. Hux looked around as best he could with his accompanying phalanx jostling him with bayonets. The compound looked to have been some sort of temple not so very long ago; the stone walls were thick, and decorated with mossy esoteric forms that had been painted or graffitied or stained with explosive and impossible patterns of blood. 

The photojournalist stayed Hux by the arm, knocking his cameras. “Where are your photographs published,” Hux asked, hardly expecting a straight answer. 

His brow furrowed with a detached embarrassment and Hux thought of any number of men he’d known before all this, in law school, having thoroughly convinced themselves they were unjustly persecuted and offended that no one with sense believed it. Either those boys had pursued graduate degrees simply to avoid the draft or they had gone to Vietnam in some quest for martyrdom on the altar of their own concocted trauma, and either they had died rather quickly or they had learned what trauma and persecution really was and they had swiftly gone insane. So it was almost certain the photojournalist had experienced the latter. “I don’t know,” he said, looking away from Hux. He had tensed a little in the shoulder and the elbow such that Hux could tell he was coming down uncomfortably from his trip. “It’s been a long time since we got a newspaper.” 

\--

They put Hux in this cage they had built for VC and animals whilst they decided what to do with him. Once or twice a day or so the photojournalist came over with a gourd full of water and the cigarettes he’d stolen and took a few pictures and expostulated on his violent love for the Colonel and else besides. The severed heads of the PBR crew had been erected on pikes nearby as though Hux cared. 

The photojournalist was from Connecticut and had been sent to Vietnam at first on assignment for _Life_. He had only been twenty-two at the time but his professors at Columbia had spoken highly of his eye and had said his better work was reminiscent of a young Steichen or the more impressionistic Weston pieces. He worshipped Frank and Winogrand and Friedlander and spoke about their work esoterically referring to white balance and other technicalities until he could tell Hux was bored. He was always looking hurt in the eyes and was usually stoned or otherwise tripping. Usually he had his little cassette player with him; evidently he had taped it off the radio a year or so ago. Customarily it played the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” 

He was telling Hux how he’d come to the camp: 

“I was with this bunch of bikers who called themselves the Knights. NVA affiliated out of Ha Tinh. We were down by Pleiku — do you know where that is?” 

Hux didn’t answer; he was saving breath and the moisture in his mouth. Of course he knew where Pleiku was. 

“Crawling with GIs. Of course we followed them — had to get a picture. There was a booby trap and it was all these folks, man… took my bike. I was cut up good from the fall and wailing — my leg was broken.” 

He rolled up the leg of the fatigues to show Hux a deep and horrible puckered white scar where evidently the bone had broken through the skin. 

“That was — April ’67 — I think I remember. What year is it now?” 

“’68; it’s November ’68.” 

“I used to cut the days on a stick but I lost it,” said the photojournalist. “Anyway he was — they put me in these very cages, man… I had the fear something awful. They had these little pre-packaged syringes of morphine. It started rotting — that’s why it looks so bad.” 

He lit one of Hux’s cigarettes. He didn’t so much put them in his mouth as he rested them against his shapely lower lip. 

“He comes over to me at last and he says, he says, ’Where you will go when it eats you is into the rest of us so we can breathe. And as such as most of us the greatest action of your life will be the last one.’” 

He leaned forward, cameras clattering, and put the cigarette between Hux’s lips. 

“Of course I survived. He was disappointed but unsurprised.” 

\--

Hux got sick in the heat, and eventually he woke up on the floor in the temple again. The photojournalist was hovering over him trying to feed him rice with his filthy fingers and he smelled like dirty water and was wild-eyed high and Hux turned his face away. The photojournalists’s ragged fingernails were insistent against his lips and tasted a little like blood or some other tannic salt and he had taken all his cameras off from around his neck except for his precious Minolta. Across the room the colonel was speaking to no one and as such perhaps to everyone. 

“The only order is in total war,” said the Colonel. “Do you see? War is a human manifestation of cleansing destruction. And war is how we evince order among ourselves. War is the truest judge of manhood and war is the truest judge of who is best suited to live and who is best suited to die. And from this we can conclude that war is God.” 

The photojournalist rose to standing and rocked a little on his heels and every once in a while during this tirade would raise his camera and snap one or two photographs and wind the film meditatively with a thumb rocking and rocking like this whole endeavor was in fact his prayer to that very God. 

“Nature is the most evident example of the order inherent in so-called chaos,” the Colonel went on. “This jungle may seem to the uninitiated a sort of cesspit of aberration but in reality there is no system more orderly known to man. Those who can live and those who can’t die so the others may live and dead things rot and nourish the plants which the animals eat which are eaten by the other animals and so on and so forth until the track of it reaches mankind who dares to assume himself the suzerain at the end of it. Consciousness is no gift. It’s a gift for — so few of us.” 

Hux felt like a sacrificial animal being cleaned and groomed for slaughter. Yet he wasn’t altogether so afraid. Perhaps it was the fever. _As most of us the greatest action of your life will be the last one_ … He had come forward after all to take part in a work. He had enlisted — he had come for this. And he had come back. The photojournalist stepped over him like a Colossus out of Goya and took a picture and the phosphorous flash of it like a flare in the night had Hux briefly convinced he could hear the chopper cutting of machine-gun fire in the bush… 

“It is a fallacy that order is the vestige of civilized man,” said the Colonel. “Civilization is a chaos of the worst kind. Civilization is every moment subdividing and multiplying like a cancer and as such those tumorous proletariat choose communism every time… Do you know why it is, Benjamin, Armitage, that we are here? We are here to fight the cancer… we are the chemotherapy, boys; we are the surgeon’s scalpel… we are here to return the chaos of civilization to its rightful animal order as ever should’ve been the process of pure capitalist imperial ambition…” 

_Click click clickclickclickclickclickclick_ and the chopper grating as he advanced the film… 

“Do you know what is the ultimate civilizing force, gentlemen? Do you know even now the tool for it is in our wheelhouse somewhere above us right now in a B-52 bomber that never stops moving? We are the only nation — the only species in history, ourselves, Americans, who could ever have created a tool of such cleansing destruction… We must drop the bomb — exterminate them all — ” 

Hux faded in and out. When he came to again the Colonel was reading from Eliot’s “The Waste Land” — 

_I have heard the key_  
_Turn in the door once and turn once only_  
_We think of the key, each in his prison_  
_Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison_  
_Only at nightfall, aetherial rumors  
_ _Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus…_

The photojournalist was sitting on the floor beside him heavy-eyed tripping and his Minolta was smashed to pieces on the floor. As Hux watched he drew one of the sharper shards of glass from the lens across the flesh inside his palm until it bled. From somewhere his precious Stones cassette was playing: 

_Pleased to meet you  
_ _hope you guessed my name_

\--

“Did you send your pictures to Life Magazine,” Hux asked. He was sitting with the photojournalist in the anteroom and they were smoking what Hux hoped was grass in a pipe. From the innermost sanctum he could hear echoing in the walls the Colonel reading a poem he didn’t recognize. Perhaps it was one of his own invention. 

The photojournalist was quizzical. “What — Life Magazine?” 

“There were photographs of the Colonel’s doing. The corpses and the heads. You know, the unsavories.” 

“I don’t — I didn’t — ” he covered his mouth with his hand. His eyes were bugging out a little and the clasp of his palm pulled the skin taught on his face showing the red and gummy insides of his eyelids. “I don’t know. No one else takes pictures here.” 

“Someone could’ve taken the film from you.” 

“Not possible.” He was feeling around himself on the floor like for a canister that had rolled. “It’s not possible.” 

“Well it is,” Hux said. “That’s why I’m here. People were shocked to see it.” 

“Those people — you know as well as I. They don’t get it, man.” He ran a hand through his greasy hair dislodging something living from it. “I don’t take pictures of those — of the _unsavories,_ man, I’m here to, to track his brilliance — ”

So it was not hash in the pipe after all. Hux felt floating but perhaps that was the lingering illness. “Don’t you think the brilliance manifests as madness sometimes,” he said.

“If it is madness man then it’s a collective tandem madness — it’s a trip we’ve all been on since the goddamn Salem Witch Trials… I can tell — don’t you feel it? If you really have been here since ’65. Haven’t you felt it, haven’t you felt he’s right?” 

_Civilization is a chaos of the worst kind,_ he heard the Colonel say inside his brain. 

“Haven’t you felt — since you came here haven’t you felt that it was the place you’d been looking for your whole life? I don’t even mean Vietnam or Cambodia or the jungle or any of it. I mean didn’t you feel like the war had been waiting for you your whole life?” 

Yes, he didn’t, couldn’t say. You’re here to kill the Colonel, he remembered, but it was like remembering he’d left the oven on. 

“This was a glorious inevitability, he’s always saying. Always always — this, this was foretold, it was forecasted. He’s a prophet. And do you know what he says is next?” 

The photojournalist pointed one shaky white finger up toward the roof of the temple. At first Hux thought he meant God — and he did mean God. But he meant the God they had created in subdividing atoms, which was ever above now and circling… 

“Natural order out of chaos. We’re so close to it now. And they sent you to us to take part in this work. Because you understand.” 

He was holding Hux’s face in his clammy filthy trembling hands now. In the other room the Colonel was reading a poem Hux thought he recognized: 

_Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
_ _The falcon cannot hear the falconer —_

“You were in it at Dak To,” said the photojournalist. Something in his voice was hypnotic. “We’ve seen your file. You watched half your battalion become casualties because they did not understand. We are here to remove the cancer. You cannot remove the cancer if you are an agent of the cancer.” 

It had given him purpose, the war, when he had had none. And it had given him an identity apart from his father’s. And it had given him that sickness of the blood and he could not shake it now that he knew what it truly was. It was an inoculation against chaos. It was a kind of precious and provocative rewiring of one’s mind to its truest primitive state. As though one had never been seduced. 

“You understand,” said the photojournalist again, and Hux nodded. 

_The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
_ _The ceremony of innocence is drowned —_

The photojournalist embraced him; he stank, and his skin was clammy, but he smelled like a man, and his arms were strong, and Hux was dearly high. The cameras pressed sharply against his chest. 

“I don’t,” Hux said, against the fabric at the photojournalist’s shoulder. “I never understood their orders in the face of the reality of this. How do you fight guerrilla warfare with a cesspool of bureaucratic mire?” 

“They sent you here to kill him because he’s doing what they’ve ordered but not the right way,” said the photojournalist. “And he’s doing what they know is true and what they know is right but not what they can sell to — back at, back in America.” 

Now and then Hux forgot it existed. After all even there he had always been wandering in the bush. 

“You have to clean it all out of your mind. Clean it all out, man.” 

He pressed the pipe back into Hux’s hand. It made him feel clean and sharp at the edges as a newly sharpened knife. The photojournalist’s big hand ranged up and down his spine lingering at the nape of his neck and the small of his back and it felt almost like it spanned his waist entire. 

He reminded Hux a little of liquid napalm. A maelstrom chaos of fire that created a kind of burned-over simplicity. A stripped and denuded vacancy where nothing was and everything could be catalogued. His hand at the small of Hux’s back slipped still lower, and then he helped Hux into his lap. Their fucking was filthy by its very nature and later Hux would think of it as a sort of manifestation of the apocalyptic hedonism to which they had committed their souls. By the end of it he had smashed another of the photojournalist’s precious cameras against the floor in vengeance for coming on his face without permission. From the other room the Colonel was reading Tennyson. 

\--

He walked into the water up to his knees knowing when he came out likely there would be leeches between his toes. There was no bottom to the river just a soft and sinking ecstasy of silt like another thicker deeper river beneath. The water was red and tannic as blood and not cold. Above him one of the swinging corpses shadowed reflective and obscene on the glassy surface. 

The crew of Green Berets had cleaned the mud and ochre from their faces and they were readying the PBR to run it downriver for supplies. In the waterproof envelope that had held Hux’s old dossier they had collected letters from the compound to be relayed ever toward the sea and whatever was left of America in the fat hollow bellies of cargo airplanes full of dead and their folded flags. 

“Can you take a letter for me?” 

They had a little extra paper and a last envelope, and a grease pencil. He wrote the letter quickly as tearing off a bandage, leaning against the muddy hull of the PBR: 

_SELL THE HOUSE_  
_SELL THE PROPERTY  
_ _I’M NEVER COMING BACK_

Folded it up and addressed it messily to his father care-of the plantation house in Assumption Parish knowing very well it was unlikely it would ever get there. The green berets took it from him and put it in the dossier. Likely it would be intercepted by Comsec and conveyed to the generals in their trailers in Nha Trang who would expostulate as they were wont to do on the course of the war as though anything could be accomplished by expostulating. And they would wonder what had driven Hux or Snoke or any of them to this as though it were not altogether entirely obvious and as though they were not treading the very same razor-edge themselves in their dreams and when they were drunk — as though muting the call of one’s atavistic and eschatological self in a time like this constituted anything other than cowardice. 

He waded up toward the shore and the photojournalist helped him up onto the bank with a hand at his wrist. He had taken photographs of Hux writing the letter and with his other hand he was advancing the film. From the old black eyes of the temple the Colonel was watching. From all around the jungle was watching and from above and below and from the precious now and the sainted past and the improbable future so too was the blistering blood-drenched war god into whose hands he had cast his life. 

There was not enough of him left now to regret it. There was only certainty. And there was work to be done. 

**Author's Note:**

> if you liked this story, please consider a donation to [planned parenthood](https://www.plannedparenthood.org/) in honor of this story's patron, [hollycomb](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hollycomb)   
> this AU is thoroughly based on apocalypse now, which in turn is based on joseph conrad's "heart of darkness." i think both these works are particularly relevant in this historical moment where anarcho-capitalism is a political stance actually believed and practiced by certain influencers in the american government who will remain unnamed, and am grateful for the opportunity to explore that in an AU under the guise that star wars is technically a colonialist narrative. thanks, holly, for everything :)   
> come talk to me [here on tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/)


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